$60 billion. That is a drop in the bucket as compared to the $10 trillion we have. Yet the doom of Dubai, seemed to have echoed around that world and got the markets panicking. What we can tell you is that we have not learned our lessons yet and this demonstrates the power house economy that US really is.

$60 billion. That is more than you and I would ever make in our lifetimes. But as a corporation, it really is not that much. Microsoft is worth more than $200 billion, Apple are Google, each, are worth more than $150 billion; so how is it that a city state that owes the world $60 billion could shake the world like it did?

The answer : silly risk taking. What caused creditors to be so afraid was that lots of the debts that we see today would be increased many times over due to the manipulation of risk. Let me give you a very much simplified example.

Lets say Company A had some formula to turn water to Gold. Company A goes to Bank A to get a loan, and Bank A approved a loan of $10 million. Bank B does not believe that Company A’s plan. So it does something called a Credit Default Swap. They would give Bank A the money for the loan. Should Company A default on her payments to Bank A, Bank A would pay Bank B $100 million.

The example that I gave above is what I call a 10:1 (100 million to 10 million) bet scenario. There are other examples in real life with methods ranging from short selling to derivatives which have a 30 : 1 bet ratio. Now that is what the EU terms as casino banking.

The same thing happened with Dubai. Should Dubai not be able to pay her debts off, the amount lost by her creditors would not be $60 billion, but in the trillions. That is what the entire pandemonium and panic is all about.

When are we going to learn our lessons? Why can’t we go back to the tried and tested system of a bank putting in capital should they believe in the business plan that they receive. Why must there be what I call sucker capitalism? When are we going to end such practices? Would the next attack be too late to save America? America and the world must wake up to this problem or we would face lots of problems in the future.

Dubai goes $60 billion in the red, and the world panics. Does anybody realize that the world is not that bothered with the trillions of dollars worth of debt when it came to the debt of countries like US, Japan and the UK? This is because the world, as of today, is still very confident in these economies.

I really hope that Dubai bring back the attention of bad banking, as what the economic crash did. It is essential that we get this back in order…

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To recap, an election took place on Nov 4 in Minnesota. It was between an incumbent crook named Norm Coleman, a clown named Al Franken and a sane person that was under funded named Dean Barkley. Dean Barkley got 16 % and the other two candidates received 42% of the vote.

Because the margin of victory was much less than 0.5%, a recount was automatically triggered as per Minnesota electoral law. The margin of victory in this election was was 0.0065%. First 133 ballots were found. That was fair. If the ballots were lost unintentionally and did not make it to the vote, I believe that they should be counted. So fair enough, this was a rightful bet gain of 46 for al Franken.

After that, everything went mad. People on the Democratic and the Republican side just started giving pointing out and submitting ballots out of no where. We are not talking one or two ballots, we are talking about close to 7000 ballots that were not counted.

It is one thing that human error is done. It is another thing altogether for this to happen at such a grand scale. I mean it really got ridiculous. Judges had to sieve out one paper at a time to see if the vote was legitimate or not. Guess what only, 10% of the votes were legitimate! Mind you, both sides gave roughly the same amount of ballots. At this point in time, if I really felt that the two candidates that were fighting for this post really should start paying for the process as they were clearly wasting a ton of time.

Majority of this 10% voted in favor of Al Franken and thus he should have “won” by 220 votes. But could Norm Coleman let this go? No! He started attacking the stupidest of all technicalities and Al Franken fought each and every one of them. This really dragged the time even further.

The saddest part is not that this vote is not done, but the manner that Minnesota is divided on this issue. It is such a disgrace. Look out at any blog that allow commentary on this topic and you would find some very flowery language. The Republican supporters claim that Al Franken stole the election and some even suggest that President Obama had a hand in wanting to make Al Franken a Senator. The Democrats in the mean time talk about how Al Franken is a messiah coming to the party and how Minnesota were sick of 8 years of Bush! These are all really crazy talk.

Not to end there, there were even crazier comments made by the candidates to the media. The craziest of which belongs to Norm Coleman who claimed that God wanted him to be Senator of Minnesota! I am not kidding at all!

Al Franken is going to win the election pretty soon. Norm Coleman is cornered and has nowhere to run. Regardless of that, I really feel that both candidates should be punished for doing this silly election. They should at least be asked to pay for it.

Lastly I feel that it is time that elections all around the world take a look at its procedure. One of the most common way to disqualify a vote on paper is to check in minute errors voting. For example in many countries, people shade the people that they want to be elected or tick in the box. Should they shade or tick outside the box even by a little bit, that vote would be rejected.

One suggestion that I can give is to create multiple boxes for elections where there are not so many people taking part. E.g. I there were 2 people standing for elections have 2 separate boxes to count 2 different votes. This really simplifies the voting process and would prevent incidents like this from happening again.

Either way, best wishes the state of Minnesota, the state of Jessie Ventura!

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